Editor's Note

PETER LABERGEFOUNDER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Here in Philadelphia, where I’m in the home stretch of my sophomore year of college, the last few stubborn snowflakes are melting. The temperature is brisk, but warm enough to venture relatively freely, for perhaps the first time since last October, without hats and parkas and mittens (or gloves, if that’s more your style). It is finally, frankly, thankfully, blessedly spring.

If I were to come up with a theme for the poetry, prose, and art in this lovely Spring Issue, it would be refreshing—and not just because of this much-anticipated weather. Refreshing because this work breathes, but doesn’t fog up the windowpanes with its breath. This work walks, maybe snaps the occasional photo on the way to where it’s going, but without delaying too much. This work dusts itself off, but has not yet forgotten the brittle, unapologetic chill of the past few months.

If you want to talk specifics—and I’m going to assume you want to talk specifics—this work takes us everywhere we’ve ever wanted to be, and a few places we don’t (but will be retrospectively glad we visited). In Dennis Hinrichsen’s “Radio Motown” and “Nights of Zhivago,"we remember the supernova of young love and family. In Alex Pruteanu’s “Patrol,” we’re right back in the heat of it. In Tory Adkisson’s “Orientalism,” we are inside Hokusai prints, and we are in love. In Emma Jo Shatto’s “Patches: Unfinished,” we feel each part of our bodies for the first time in a long time, and in Sarah Rose Nordgren’s “Kindling,” we aren’t even sure where we are, if we are.

Regardless of the direction in which these pieces of writing and art travel, it seems the word every piece wants to repeat is finally. Finally, we are here. Finally, we can love—ourselves, each other, the world. Finally, it is all over, or just beginning, or maybe just not done yet.